A hundred years after his death, it is high time to put this evolutionary pioneer in his proper place – as Charles Darwin's equal, argues Stephanie Pain

YESTERDAY I met someone who had never heard of Alfred Russel Wallace. They were as amazed by my enthusiasm for a long-dead collector of beetles, butterflies and birds as I was by their admission that, really, they had no idea who he was.

What made the hole in my otherwise well-informed friend's knowledge even more surprising was that this year, the centenary of Wallace's death, has seen an outbreak of what could almost be called Wallacemania. Reprints of his books have been published, there are conferences and websites galore, and there is even at long last a statue at the Natural History Museum in London.

Exotic beetles were among Wallace's passions as a collector of new species(Image: Nils Jorgensen/REX)

My admiration, and that of so many biologists, ecologists and natural history enthusiasts, is easy to explain. Wallace was a self-taught naturalist, who despite lacking the usual advantages of the Victorian gentleman scientist became one of the most revered men of his age. He had little formal education, no family wealth to draw on and no friends in high scientific places. But he did have passion, perception, and the resourcefulness and resilience to survive 12 years in the remote and dangerous tropics.

In 1848, Wallace headed to the Amazon with entomologist Henry Bates. Their plan was to collect specimens and attempt to answer the big question of the day: how do species arise? Practically penniless, the pair funded their travels by selling specimens to collectors back in England.

After four years, Wallace left for home, only to be shipwrecked and lose almost everything he had worked for. Undeterred, two years later he sailed for the Malay Archipelago, islands stretching from Malaysia to New Guinea. In eight years of island hopping, he travelled some 22,000 kilometres and collected over 125,000 specimens, including more than 5000 new species.

Delicate arrangement

The fact that Wallace isn't a household name is harder to explain. In 1858, he prompted one of the most famous and controversial events in the history of science: the hurriedly arranged reading of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection at the Linnean Society of London. During his travels, Wallace had independently reached the same conclusions as Darwin, and in March 1858, he sent Darwin a paper explaining his thinking. In it he wrote: "The life of wild animals is a struggle for existence and the weakest and least perfectly organised must always succumb..."

Darwin, who had been developing his theory for almost 20 years, was distraught, yet he resigned himself to being scooped by his younger correspondent. Darwin's eminent friends, geologist Charles Lyell and botanist Joseph Hooker, had other ideas. They cooked up a "delicate arrangement" to ensure both men received credit for the idea. Unknown to Wallace and despite Darwin's misgivings, Lyell and Hooker presented Wallace's paper alongside some of Darwin's earlier notes outlining his theory.

The arrangement was as dodgy then as it would be now, but in the event it suited Darwin and Wallace. Darwin got the recognition he fully deserved and Wallace earned his entrée to the scientific establishment. When Wallace eventually learned what had happened, far away in Indonesia, he wrote to Hooker to thank him "for the course you have adopted, which while strictly just to both parties is so favourable to myself".

Wallace was still in the Malay Archipelago in 1859 when Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Returning home three years later, Wallace turned his attention to another great puzzle – why are species distributed the way they are? What part does geography play in the evolution of species?

In the Amazon, he had found slightly different species on opposite sides of the river. In the archipelago, he found islands with their own unique species. Most famously, when he crossed the narrow but deep channel between the islands of Bali and Lombok, he discovered strikingly different sorts of birds and other animals. He realised he had crossed a boundary between two major zoological realms: on one side, the animals were typical of Asia, on the other of Australasia. The boundary is known as Wallace's Line.

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